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I had missed this project somehow :)

go MarsExpress go ... nice results from its radar!

Quote: "It's a little queasy sounding, but there's no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding"

Judging by the color it probably contains a lot of melanin. ;-)

from a linux guru ...

Tea, Earl Grey, hot...

Lets see what part of the replicator will work first: the actual 3D-printing of the tea or the language recognition software...

Oh yes, I forgot about the language recognition... The abominations it might produce... :-[]

Good luck, Helia! ;-)

Billion-Pixel view from curiosity at Rocknest...

Rover Curiosity finds man-made shiny material on Mars. It seems the rover is littering plastic on the planet!

Their planetary protection officers will have some interesting questions to ask ...

NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program provides funding to study a small number of highly advanced spaceflight concepts, with the goal of understanding the technological possibilities which will guide the development of future space missions. Under this program, a JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) researcher has proposed the use of a pair of CubeSats for an autonomous mission to retrieve samples from Phobos, Mars' larger moon.

Check the landing video from the onboard camera - Guido: how well would our optical flow algorithm cope with such images? Looks quite complicated to me....

Note that videos there are said to be "thumbnail" quality, so I think videos with higher resolution (and possibly frame rate) have been acquired, just that they were not downloaded yet.

Interpolation of the images of the curiosity landing. Very nice work!

this is fantastic!!!

HIRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) images show flows lengthen and darken on rocky equator-facing slopes from late spring to early fall. The seasonality, latitude distribution and brightness changes suggest a volatile material is involved, but there is no direct detection of one.

Robotics scientists at TED unleash co-ordinated drones that mimic bird behavior to play the James Bond theme song At TED2012, the University of Pennsylvania's deputy dean for education Vijay Kuma showed off his latest accomplishment in robotics: a co-ordinated rendition of the James Bond theme song.

The researchers used a global climate model to show that if an extreme emissions pathway -- RCP8.5 -- is followed up until 2035, allowing temperatures to rise 1°C above the 1970-1999 mean, and then SRM (Solar Radiation Management) is implemented for 25 years and suddenly stopped, global temperatures could increase by 4°C in the following decades.

Nice quantitative study. They treat the problem within the full uncertainty range of climate sensitivity parameter (much uncertain), very complete. However, at SRM ceasing, after an initial positive spike of Radiative Forcing, the rate of warming seems to return to rates predicted for the non-geoengineering case: "The 20-year temperature trends following SRM cessation are 0.2−0.6 °C/decade for the range of climate sensitivities (figure 5), comparable to those trends that occur under the RCP8.5 scenario without any SRM." I am actually working on a similar idea for deliberate Mars terraforming: aiming to cool the planet down before we introduce a positive Temperature raising feedback with greenhouse gases, maybe could be more efficient than warming itself.

Probably related to the former ACT study on asteroid spin-up and the YORP effect.

Interesting discussion is going about, on how work anxiety is spreading in academia, with possible mental consequences. And with robust links to the "Doing What You Love" motto of life/work. Could be proven an unsustainable model though. Recalling of Higgs' recent declaration, that today's Academia productivity demands would be hectic for him, could point to the direction of the problem and the solution...?

Now this is an interesting hypothesis! Would make terraforming a bit easier 

Having an ocean on Mars would solve so many problems... btw, again this guy? Isabelle take a look at that : Tim Lenton is everywhere, last time he wrote half of our literature references on the tipping points study.